Performance Platform dashboard admin

After releasing about a hundred dashboards in the last couple of weeks,
members of the product team I’m part of at the Government Digital Service each spent a
week prototyping standalone projects that we thought would be of use to the Performance Platform.
Tom and I created a basic interface for administering dashboards.

We only had a week so we didn’t want to spend time thinking about where it would
be hosted or how authentication could work, so we created a Node.js app
that non-technical members of our team can download and run locally.

We ended up with an application that uses a GitHub repository to store our
configuration and does file modification, committing, pushing, pulling and deploying
through a browser. It’s hacky but it does exactly what we need it to do. SSH handles
authentication in the background and GitHub provides us with a lovely interface
for a history of who, what and when things changed.

Hopefully this marks the end of Matt having to write out text changes into
Pivotal Tracker stories just to wait for a developer to copy and paste them into an
editor and push a commit.